With another year upon us, people are beginning to think about how to enact their new year’s resolutions. Some of us want to live healthier, some of us want to check something off a bucket list, but the one thing that is certainly attainable, with minimal effort, this coming year is decluttering your home. If eliminating clutter around the house was part of your new year’s resolution, below are some tips for helping you plan your escape from clutter.

You Have to Start Somewhere

Decluttering efforts can often become derailed by confusion. There is so much to get rid of and you don’t know where to start. Just start somewhere. Don’t think about it. Anywhere you think there is clutter, just start, in no particular order and then work your way through the house.

Sort First and Store Things After

The time for putting things away is after you have already decluttered. There is a good reason for this: if you start to store and declutter at the same time, you may find yourself distracted by the storing and forget all about the decluttering. One thing at a time will make your life and your job much easier.

Try to Make It as Enjoyable as Possible

If you are enlisting the help of your family for the decluttering process, you are going to want to make it fun. Put on some fun music for the kids, make it a game, hand out prizes for who can declutter the best and the fastest. Reward yourself too. For every day you keep to your decluttering schedule, treat yourself to something small.

Schedule Time

There is where most time-oriented news year’s resolutions fall flat, you have to actually schedule the time to follow through on the decluttering. If you know that you are going to have a chunk of time on a certain day, earmark it for decluttering and actually get the job done.

Be Preventative

The one thing about clutter is that unless you have a preventative plan, there will always be more. If you find while you are decluttering that you are finding a lot of things that you thought would be useful to you and your family at the time, but have no recollection of using even once, add those items to a list and then once you are done, analyze that list to figure out where your purchasing weaknesses are and what you need to change.

Decluttering gets rid of junk not only in your home, but in your mind. Studies have shown that having an orderly, clutter free home actually has a positive psychological benefit on you and can create a sense of order in your mind as well. Make decluttering your news year’s resolution this year and live the rest of your year, and hopefully beyond, clutter free.